A virtual graveyard built with hand-written obituaries resurrects the websites, apps, messengers, and gadgets that faded fast after the late-1990s boom—along with the lessons those disappearances left behind.
Somewhere in the late-1990s glow of dial-up memory, 1999 still feels close. But in technology time, it isn’t. New sites, apps, and devices keep appearing—and just as quickly, they vanish.
That churn is exactly what Burak Ozdemir built a response to: a virtual graveyard filled with hand-written obituaries and the kind of classiest 90s-era web design that can make loss feel oddly tangible. It’s not just a list of forgotten names. It’s a place to look at the short. bright lifespans of internet things we used to treat like they would last.
The entries cover a sweep of the era’s online life: instant messengers and social networks. web hosts. and the devices people carried or relied on before the world moved on. If you had an ICQ number. you probably remember how central it felt back then—and you might also remember being on GeoCities or a similar web host.
Some nostalgia is easier to spot, like Google+. Even if you weren’t into its virtual hangouts, the idea mattered: it offered a connection to people around the world in a way that hasn’t been replicated in quite the same form.
Not everything on the graveyard is widely known. Services like Songza didn’t make it into every memory lane—but they earned a place in the same cemetery. And then there are the stories that wobble between disappearance and a strange return: Pebble devices are described as punching a zombified hand back up through six feet of soil. shambled back into daylight.
The graveyard also reaches beyond the 90s. Microsoft’s short-lived Tay is included, a reminder that public chatbots can move faster than safety. Tay’s brief life is framed as a lesson in the need for safety rigging—one that, the entry suggests, was mostly remembered by later chatbots.
Even in a world where some parts of personal publishing never fully die—forum signatures and personal homepages are acknowledged as still living on—the end of Clippy is described as something many people will mourn. It’s the kind of detail that hits harder than the rest, because Clippy wasn’t just software. It was a presence.
Taken together, the virtual graveyard reads like a timeline of the internet’s mood swings: the excitement of what arrived, the speed of what left, and the quiet way that design styles, communities, and tools become “lost” long before most people realize they’re already watching the countdown.
virtual graveyard Burak Ozdemir 90s web design ICQ GeoCities Google+ Songza Pebble devices Microsoft Tay Clippy instant messengers social networks web hosts chatbots
So is this like a museum for old apps? Kinda sad but also lol remember ICQ.
I don’t get why they call it a “virtual graveyard” when half that stuff could just be archived. Like where’s the actual files? Also Tay was creepy, so bringing it back in any form is yikes.
Clippy deserved better. People act like it was just a little dude but it literally saved me from grammar mistakes like every day back then. If this site has all the old versions, I’m gonna download it before it disappears again.
Wait… Pebble “came back from six feet of soil”? I thought Pebble just died because the batteries were bad? And GeoCities was like, illegal or something right? Idk I’m confused but the Google+ part made me laugh because that one lasted way shorter than people admit.